Small Group's Inside Role in Goals-Setting Provides Clues to Education Policymaking

Almost every governor and most of President Bush's Cabinet made the
trip to the education summit in Charlottesville, Va., last September
for two days of roundtable discussions and speechmaking.

Arguably, however, the real action took place in a room at the
Boar's Head Inn, where three governors and a White House official,
accompanied by their aides, hammered out an agreement on the document
that was to be the summit's only tangible product.

It was essentially that same small group that fashioned the
education goals adopted by the National Governors' Association late
last month. And, by all indications, that same group will lead efforts
to fashion strategies to achieve those targets.

The nature of the goals-setting process, the identity of the
participants, and the details of their agendas provide important clues
about how subsequent events will unfold and about how education policy
in the Bush Administration is made. And more than anything else,
lessons learned from the past several months reveal the essentially
political nature of setting a national education agenda.

Three men have made up the innermost circle: Roger B. Porter, Mr.
Bush's domestic-policy adviser, and the two governors who were named
co-chairmen of the NGA's education task force--Bill Clinton of
Arkansas, a Democrat, and Carroll A. Campbell of South Carolina, a
Republican.

Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, the NGA's chairman, was at the
pivotal Charlottesville meeting, and he and Gov. Booth Gardner of
Washington were significantly involved at other junctures in the
process.

John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, and Richard G.
Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, attended some
of the key meetings and consulted regularly with Mr. Porter.

Cavazos' Role

Secretary of Education Lauro F. Cavazos was not at the Boar's Head,
and he acknowledged in an interview last week that he attended few
policy meetings.

Nikki McNamee, director of Mr. Campbell's Washington office, said
that she thought Mr. Cavazos "was a player," and that he or "his
people," particularly Christopher T. Cross, assistant secretary for
educational research and improvement, attended many of the work
sessions.

But others who were close to the process said the Secretary did not
play an important role--or at least not one that was apparent to
them.

"I think it said a lot about his position in the Administration,"
one source said.

"When there were public things like the summit," Mr. Cavazos was
there, said Gloria Cabe, an Arkansas state legislator who has been Mr.
Clinton's chief aide during the goals-setting process.

But, she added,"when we were talking about specific language and so
forth, he wasn't there."

Mr. Cross, in an interview, characterized his role as "a research
role."

"We [OERI officials] were not setting policy," and did not
attend "policy meetings," he said. "Our role was to point out issues
like whether something can be measured and what the status of the data
is."

Mr. Cavazos last week contested assertions that he did not play an
important role.

Asked if he thinks Mr. Porter tried to freeze the Secretary out of
the process, Mr. Cavazos said, "I don't think it was" what happened.
But, he added, "Certainly somebody could have had that opinion."

"I can't just set everything aside and devote all my energies to
setting national goals," Mr. Cavazos said. "Roger [Porter] can devote
full time to that; I have a big department to run."

The Secretary said he made his mark by consulting with Mr. Porter
and asserted that many of the ideas and much of the draft language Mr.
Porter advanced in negotiations came from him and others in the
Education Department.

"Those goals would not have happened if not for the Department of
Education, frankly, because the expertise does not exist in the White
House to develop these goals," Mr. Cavazos added.

Porter at the Lead

Mr. Porter also contended in an interview last week that the
Secretary was too busy to attend a lot of meetings. Mr. Porter said he
began filling the lead Administration role in the process when he was
asked to coordinate "the policy side" of the education summit, which
was "obviously" a White House event.

He said he consulted frequently with Mr. Cavazos, as well as with
Mr. Sununu and Mr. Darman. And he characterized the work done by
OERI officials as "extraordinarily helpful," although he noted that
OMB staff members also made important contributions.

Mr. Porter said that he discussed the draft goals a few times with
Mr. Bush, but that the President was not involved in hammering out
details. Mr. Porter said he "walked [the President] through the whole
thing" at a meeting shortly before Mr. Bush announced the goals in his
State of the Union Message in January.

"He provides excellent guidance without micromanaging," Mr. Porter
said. "I knew where he wanted to come out and what he was comfortable
with. And he did give me specific guidance with regards to particular
things he wanted to see in there."

Education Experts

While Mr. Porter apparently confined his consultations to
Administration officials, the key governors and n.g.a. staff members
regularly consulted with a handful of education experts while
developing their proposed goals and objectives.

Named as the most significant "consultants" were Marc S. Tucker,
executive director of the National Center on Education and the Economy;
Marshall Smith, dean of Stanford University's education school; Frank
Newman, president of the Education Commission of the States; and
Theodore R. Sizer, chairman of Brown University's education
department.

Chester E. Finn Jr., professor of education and public policy at
Vanderbilt University and Mr. Cross's predecessor, was also mentioned.
And governors and their aides said they also talked with
representatives of teachers' unions and other education groups from
time to time.

"I spent a couple of days in meetings; I wrote a few things for the
governors, especially Clinton; there were faxes back and forth," Mr.
Smith said in an interview.

"They would ask me, 'What do you think of this language? Does this
make sense?"' he said. "I pushed my own ideas; so did other people, so
it's hard to take credit for anything."

The key participants also sought input in formal ways, such as
hearings in which dozens of educators, business leaders, and other
interested parties spoke and submitted written suggestions. The White
House organized a series of meetings before the summit in which
interested parties spoke with the President. Mr. Bush's education
advisory committee also met to discuss the goals.

Aides say that they weighed all this input, and that some of the
education groups' suggestions are similar to ideas that appear in the
goals document. But, participants agree, it is virtually impossible to
trace the origin of particular ideas.

"A lot of things got in there because someone made a compelling
argument, and it got on the agenda," Mr. Newman said. "Once that
happened, suddenly 50 people suggested it; when something dropped like
a brick, it was found on a scrap of paper lying on the floor."

While the documents were the product of many minds, participants
said, it was ultimately Mr. Porter and Mr. Clinton who came to the
negotiating table with their respective drafts and battled over which
language and which format to use.

'Different Marching Orders'

"A lot of things had to be worked out, and we were in different
positions with different marching orders," Mr. Clinton said in an
interview last week. "He thought he could get an educationally sound
document while working within the President's campaign promises and
Darman's budget instructions."

"He tried to control the ball as much as he could," Mr. Clinton
said, "but so did I."

Mr. Campbell was also directly involved in later stages. Ms. McNamee
said he saw his role as that of an "honest broker" between the White
House and the governors, a role Mr. Clinton could not play because he
is a Democrat.

"I respect him for that," Mr. Clinton said, adding that Mr. Campbell
"made [the goals statement] a stronger document because he was willing
to side with the governors" when he saw fit.

From the beginning, there was tension between the governors' desire
to establish specific goals and Mr. Porter's desire to avoid locking
the President into promises he could not keep.

Before the summit, "it didn't appear that the White House had a
clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish," and they did not want to
issue a statement, said Michael Cohen, an NGA education analyst who
was a key participant in all phases of the negotiations.

But Mr. Cohen said the consensus among governors was that they
wanted something more conclusive.

"The governors--both Democrats and Republicans--didn't want to give
the President a public-relations photo opportunity and get nothing out
of it," he said.

The governors succeeded. Mr. Clinton came to the meeting armed with
a draft, which was the document revised that night at the Boar's Head
Inn. Mr. Porter's primary contribution, Mr. Cohen said, was language
calling for regulatory flexibility.

Level of Specificity Debated

The agreement promised that education goals would be announced at
the February NGA meeting, and it established the broad areas in
which goals would be set.

In negotiations over subsequent months, the governors and NGA
staff members tried to work into the goals document many specific
targets, with numerical benchmarks.

A draft Mr. Clinton brought to a key December meeting, for example,
included such specific proposals as reducing the incidence of low-
birthweight babies to 5 percent and increasing the number of students
passing advanced-placement calculus exams by 50 percent. Later drafts
were more streamlined.

"About halfway into the process, we realized we weren't going to be
able to achieve that level of specificity that quickly," Ms. Cabe
said.

In contrast, Mr. Porter's December draft included essentially the
same six goals that were ultimately adopted. The only major change he
made in later drafts was to substitute the assessment-based achievement
goal that appears in the final version for an achievement goal calling
for completion of a rigorous curriculum.

Participants say Mr. Porter insisted on the six goals he had
drafted, and the governors finally agreed. Both Democratic and
Republican governors have said they wanted the attention that inclusion
in Mr. Bush's State of the Union speech would give the goals.

"The President had the say-so on what he said in that speech," Mr.
Clinton said. "Because of that, there was a subtle shift to where the
agreement had to be more on their [the White House's] terms."

But many of the ideas included in the early NGA drafts are
included in the final document as objectives, or in the narrative
sections on assessment and "necessary changes" in the educational
system.

Those sections contain verbatim passages from early Clinton drafts,
and participants said the governor apparently wrote much of those
sections himself.

Future Roles

One dispute that has not been resolved is the makeup and role of a
bipartisan commission both the governors and Mr. Porter want to
establish to oversee implementation of the goals. The governors want
broad representation, particularly from the Congress; Mr. Porter wants
the board to be a Presidential commission whose staff work is done in
the Education Department.

However that issue is resolved, Mr. Porter will apparently have less
control over the next stage of the process, in which the governors are
to draft strategies to enable the goals to be achieved.

Mr. Porter said it is his understanding that the governors will
develop state-specific strategies and that the White House will not
approve them--or be responsible for them.

"Governors make a very legitimate point," he said, "that 'we're
happy to have you folks working on goals, but you're not going to
determine how we reach those goals in my state."'

He also noted that the necessary changes must come at the state and
local levels, adding that "there was a very strong conviction that
trying to have a top-down approach would be counterproductive."

Asked if this is an attempt to shrink from political accountability,
Mr. Porter said: "It's not just [Mr. Bush] saying, 'It's your
responsibility.' He's prepared to continue to give leadership on this
thing" and support increased funding for Head Start and research
activities.

Mr. Cavazos said his role now is to try to focus attention on the
goals, and to shape the department's activities toward achieving them.
He included a five-page summary of items in his proposed 1991 budget
that are aimed in that direction.

Mr. Cross said the agency's research arm will work on assessment and
strategy.

"There's enormous implications; it's going to drive this agency for
literally the next decade," he said.

Participants readily acknowledge that educators and parents must
sign on, and some observers think there will be resistance.

"Change comes hard; to the educator, it's a change in his or her
life," Mr. Newman said.

Others think educators will resist goals that were set by
politicians.

"At last report, Roger Porter had not established a dictatorship
over 2 million teachers," said Bruce Hunter, an associate executive
director of the American Association of School Administrators.

Bitterness about being excluded is already apparent on Capitol
Hill.

At a recent hearing, Representative Augustus F. Hawkins, chairman of
the House Education and Labor Committee, sarcastically commended an
Education Department official for suggesting that the Congress be a
partner in implementing the goals.

"I appreciated that because he included the Congress, which until
now hasn't been included," Mr. Hawkins said. "I'm now encouraged to
bring before the committee legislative ideas I haven't participated
in.''

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